Node.js did really well on tasks that have lots of concurrent requests that are mostly waiting, did OK on basic static serving tasks and not so well on compute-intensive tasks.
Having developed an interest in minimal web-servers, I wondered how Sinatra and, by association, Ruby on Rails would do.
For Sinatra I used the scanty blog engine and the basic "Hello World" example:
require 'sinatra'
get '/hi' do
"Hello World!"
end
For Ruby on Rails, I used the blog tutorial "out of the box", invoking it with "
rails s"
to start the server. In addition I also had RoR just serving a static file instead of the database-backed blog. All this on my new dev machine, a 2011 MacBook Air with 1.8 GHz Intel Core i7 and 4 GB of DRAM. I also discovered that httperf is a much better benchmark program for
my needs than ab. I used
it with 100 requests per connection, a burst length of 100 and a sufficient number
of connections to get stable results without taking all day.| Platform | # requests/sec |
| Apache | 5884 |
| Sinatra Hello World | 357 |
| Ruby on Rails static page | 312 |
| Sinatra scanty blog | 101 |
| Ruby on Rails blog | 17 |
Is this considered normal or am I doing something wrong?
That is very slow. I hesitate to speculate too much about your app configuration but one place to start is to check which rails environment you stared your server in. `rails s` will default to the development environment which is very handy during development but completely useless for determining what sort of load the framework can support. Among other things the development environment configuration sets `config.cache_classes` and `config.action_view.cache_template_loading` to false by default. That means that on every request to a development environment the server not only re-renders the view templates from scratch but also reloads every class it uses to do so! Very convenient when it allows you to edit a class and pick up the changes on the next request without requiring a server restart but no way to measure the performance of your application. Use `rails s -e production` to start the app using your production environment (environment settings are defined in `config/environments/*.rb`) and see what a difference that makes.
ReplyDeleteHi Jonah, thanks for the tips. I had looked at 'production' before, but it seems to assume that you will then create a whole production environment, which seems a little overkill. I'll see what I can do with your advice.
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